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Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer: ‘Dead false’ to say people who run companies are ‘job creators’

07/09/12 10:59 PMUpdated 09/06/13 07:02 AM

Venture capitalist and billionaire Nick Hanauer told Lawrence O’Donnell that the Republican-backed notion that that people who run companies are job creators is “dead false.”

“This idea is a way of completely misunderstanding how economies truly work,” Hanauer said on The Last Word Monday. ”The people who create jobs is the middle class. When a middle class consumer buys something from a company, that is what creates jobs. And that’s why it doesn’t matter very much if rich people pay higher rates of tax, because the true engine of job creation is a thriving middle class.”

“A businessperson calling themselves a job creator is like a school claiming to have created evolution,” Hanauer added. “It’s just not true.”

The notion that the rich are “job creators” is at the core of Mitt Romney’s economic platform. Like the rest of his party, Romney opposes raising taxes even on the richest 2 percent of Americans, arguing that doing so would stymie job growth.